Diva
Sixteen
AT SIX-THIRTY SHARP, a bright red pickup truck came tearing down our driveway in a cloud of dust. Beth’s Dad bought her the 4x4 for her eighteenth birthday. “Boys love girls in trucks,” he’d said as he handed her the keys. We’d all laughed because she had to have the seat customized so she could reach the pedals and still see out the windshield. Beth barely topped five feet, but she loved that truck.
I stepped off the front porch and sauntered toward where she’d stopped, but I was still several feet away when her door opened and I saw her legs drop down below the door. I don’t think I’d ever seen Beth’s bare legs except maybe once when we all went swimming. She was strictly a blue jeans girl in high school. But these weren’t the chubby little legs I remembered from that outing. Nor was the svelte, stacked babe that stepped around the truck door the “Dumpling” of my childhood.
“Beth?” I said. I knew I shouldn’t gawk, but… “Wow!”
“So where’s this hot jock I’m supposed to be dating?” she asked, posing by the door.
“I’d say he’s still upstairs, but you’d make me go get him,” I said. “Wow, Dumpling!” I stopped myself. “I can’t really call you that anymore, can I?”
“Tony, you can call me the south end of a horse headed north if you want to. What I look like doesn’t change who I am.”
“I hope not!” I said. “But what you look like might give some guys a different idea.”
“Really, Pogo? What kind of ideas does it give you?” she swished herself over to where I’d stopped and put her hands behind my neck. It was still a bit of a reach.
“Oh! I don’t mean me, Dumpling! I just mean… well… shit… what do I mean?”
“I think you mean you were about to get in the truck,” she growled.
“Yeah. Exactly.” We turned and headed for the truck and Beth caught hold of my arm and squeezed it. Then she stopped and spun me toward her. She squeezed my bicep a little more and then poked me in the stomach. I saw it coming and tensed my gut, so she didn’t sink in at all. She grabbed my shirttails and pulled it up to expose my stomach. Well, I have been working out for a while and Pilates does wonders for the abs.
“Jesus Christ, Pogo! You didn’t really go and become a jock, did you?”
“Well, I do play,” I said.
“Last time I heard, the only thing you played was racquetball.”
“Yeah. Imagine my surprise to find out it was a sport,” I chuckled. I pulled my shirt down and she pulled it back up to poke at my stomach again. Finally, she let the shirt fall back down.
“You got washboard abs from playing racquetball?”
“Well, not just. It was from all the training.”
“Training for what?”
“Intercollegiate National Championships and the National Singles Championships,” I said calmly. Well, hell. I was proud of it. This was the first real opportunity I’d had to brag about it.
“When?”
“I got back on Mothers’ Day.”
“Back?”
“From Chicago. Where the championships were played.”
“Did you win?”
“No. But I played.”
“No way.”
“I’ve got it on video. It’s on YouTube.” Beth grabbed my arm and marched me right back toward the house.
“I suppose there’s a Tony Ames Channel on YouTube now, right?” she snarled. I stopped and gasped. That thought hadn’t crossed my mind.
“Geez! I hope not. Where are we going?”
“You’re going to show me. Right now.”
I took her into the family room where Dad had downloaded my match against Karl onto our set-top box and I knew he’d shown it to a few other people who had come over. The TV was set to play it. Beth sat at the edge of the sofa watching the seven-point match.
“That’s the national champion I’m playing,” I filled her in. “His name’s Karl Higgendorfer and he’s a great guy.”
“You played him in the tournament?”
“No. I did actually win a couple of matches in the tournament. Karl challenged me to a match the day before the tournament began.”
“The national champion challenged you to a pre-tournament match-up.” She looked at me when the finished the video. “What else?”
“A lot of things have changed since last year,” I said. Before I could continue, though, she jumped up.
“Let’s go,” she commanded. She was dragging me out to the truck. “That bitch Ramona is going to be at this party and you had better have eyes for no one but me. Got it? I want every boy and every girl at the party to be pissed over what they missed out on. For both of us.”
“Don’t you want to, like… entice someone?” I asked. Shit, I thought she’d be ready to prey on all the people who’d dissed her in high school.
“Oh yeah,” she smiled.
You’ve got to understand a bit about country parties. It’s not like going to somebody’s apartment in the city and getting drunk on cheap wine or worse rum where you’re confined to three rooms and a sofa. We party outside… on a farm… with woods, creeks, barns, sheds, bushes, and heavy implements. Donny had a volleyball net set up and by the time we got there, they were already picking up teams. Beth dragged me over and immediately declared that we were playing. Donny looked at her and his eyes got as big as saucers. He stammered.
“Yeah. Sure. You can be on my team.”
Stoney, apparently the team captain for the opposition, looked daggers at Donny. I don’t think he knew who either of us were. He pointed at me and said, “Yeah. You, over here.”
I was headed that way when Beth grabbed my arm.
“Lose the shirt, stud,” she said and proceeded to peel her own top off. She was wearing a bikini top under it and every male and most of the female eyes were riveted to it. Beth had lost a lot of weight the past year, but none of it came off her breasts. There was enough saliva being dripped on the ground to make it muddy. I stripped off my shirt and tensed my abs for Beth’s benefit, and that didn’t go unnoticed, either. We grinned at each other and took our places.
I’m not a great volleyball player. But I was in great shape. So, when other guys were sagging out and running for a beer, I was still returning serves and everyone discovered I had a wicked spike. My side lost, mostly because all the guys were so intent on Beth’s boobs they missed every shot. When we headed toward our shirts, guys were mobbing Beth. I noticed the aforementioned Ramona headed toward me.
Ramona was every geek’s nemesis. Cheerleader, beauty queen—or what passed for one in Nebraska—and a personality that was all about how she, and everyone else, looked. While neither Beth nor I were exactly geeks, we didn’t fit in for other reasons. Beth was valedictorian and I was an artist. ’Nuf said. We were always fair game for Ramona’s self-glorifying barbs. Her graduation day remark had offended nearly everyone. “Well, of course she’s valedictorian. What else did she have to do?”
I caught Beth’s eye and nodded my head toward the approaching bitch. She broke away from the guys who were complimenting her and was by my side before Ramona could reach me. Not bothering with her shirt, she grabbed my arm and spun me in the opposite direction.
“Come on,” she said brightly. “After that workout, I need a drink!” We marched away from the descending Ramona and, by the time we reached the drinks, we were laughing our asses off.
Contrary to popular opinion, hot, horny teenagers in the middle of the Bible belt don’t just sneak into their bedrooms or the nearest hayloft and fuck. There are rituals to be observed, and if you drive a truck or a car without much backseat, there is a limitation to the places you can really go. But we have land. And our land has a lot of hiding places on it if you can figure out a way to get to it without drawing attention. So we have games. Like hide ’n’ seek. Played with couples. You get the idea.
As soon as the game was called, Beth grabbed my hand and two beers and dragged me away. The thing is that the couple that’s doing the seeking, can’t go make out in the bushes until they find another couple. So they really look hard and most of us know all the good places to hide, even those of us who barely ever played. Cavanaugh’s had plenty of places around the farm and the rule was you had to hide within the fence-lines. I had no idea where to go, but Beth apparently had a plan.
We made a stop at her truck and she opened the door. That turned on the dome light which I was sure was visible from where the seekers were counting out their time. Just in case they hadn’t seen, she made a point of slamming the door shut as soon as she’d retrieved a blanket from behind the seat. Then instead of heading into the yard, she headed toward the road.
“Hey, we have to stay within the fence-line,” I said naively.
“No. We have to hide within the fence-line,” she corrected me. We headed out their property gate, took a right along the road and came back in the corn field next to the property, staying low since the corn was only a couple feet tall. When we’d circled all the way to the back fence-line, she hunched over and I followed her along the fence to a space beside the raspberry patch. No one ever went out there because the ground was hard and you never knew when you’d find an unexpected thorn. But armed with her heavy dark blanket, Beth headed straight for the patch, laid the blanket down next to it and then herself. When I’d lain down beside her, she flipped the blanket up and covered us, effectively blocking light from reflecting off our skin.
“Now,” she said, “just lie here quietly and keep us covered.”
“It’s getting hot in here,” I said. Actually that was true on multiple levels. The day had been plenty warm, and even though it was after eleven, it was still plenty hot out and the blanket was increasing the temperature. But Beth had planned this and it was her bikini-top clad skin pressed against mine that was making things hot, humid, and sticky. I was still a teen for another two-and-a-half months yet. I was acutely aware of the bare, sexy skin touching me, and even more aware of the lips that were suddenly pressing insistently against mine.
“We really have the last laugh on all of them, Pogo,” Beth whispered against me. “None of them would have anything to do with us in high school, and now they are all wondering what they missed. And here we are, finding out.”
“But Beth…” I started. She shut me up with another kiss and I let my lips part at the insistence of her tongue. Geez! I always liked Beth. She was my best pal. We did so much together, but…
Holy shit! She’d reached down and grabbed my cock through my shorts. Damn! Shit! Fuck! No! I broke the kiss and pushed her away, grabbing for her hand and pulling it up off my sudden erection.
“Tony, I saved myself for you. I want you to be the one,” she whispered, pulling my hand to her breast.
“No, Beth,” I said, pulling away. “I can’t. Please.”
“No! You’re not really… that was all a rumor… please tell me you’re not really gay.”
“I’m really not gay,” I said.
“Then it’s okay?” she asked pleadingly.
“No,” I said. “Girlfriend.”
Beth didn’t scream at me. Didn’t hit me. Didn’t react anything like I thought would be logical—but what do I really know about girls? She buried her head against my chest, wrapped her arms around me, and quietly sobbed against me.
What could I do? I held her. I petted her hair. She was my best friend for years, sometimes the only kid at school I could call a friend. And I’d just hurt her. I wept as well.
We left the party about midnight. We’d never been found. We just stayed under the blanket whispering together. When we left and headed past the bonfire, people just stared at the two of us, holding hands and carrying a dark blanket to the bright red pick-up. We didn’t say goodbye to anyone.
Beth drove up to my house and got out of the truck to walk up with me. I hugged her at the door. When I opened it she started to come in with me.
“Um… Beth, I’m going to go to bed now. Alone.” She shook her head at me.
“I want to see.”
“See what?”
“Her picture. You must have pictures of her.” Oh boy. Interestinger and interestinger, said Alice. I hadn’t told anyone other than my parents what my real arrangement was. But Beth was my best friend in high school. I figured I owed her this.
“Okay. Come on.”
We walked up the old farmhouse stairs, which creaked unmercifully. Sure enough, before we got to my door my parents’ bedroom door opened and Mom stepped out into the hall.
“Is that you, Tony?” she asked. Well, unless Dad was out partying someplace, I’m the only one she would expect to be coming home at this hour, right?
“Yeah, Mom. You remember Beth, right?”
“Of course. Oh Beth, you look beautiful. Please try to be quiet,” Mom said. “We just got to sleep.”
“I’m going to make a phone call, Mom,” I said. “So I’ll close my door.”
“Of course you will,” she smiled.
Mom retreated to her room and I led Beth into mine. Once the door was shut, I pulled out my cell phone, but before I could dial, Beth had gone straight to my easel and pulled the cover off the painting.
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